1. Field of the Invention
In the field of conventional infantry armement, weighted ribbons have been used for a long time which are wound around grenades and which retain a piece enabling operation: they prevent arming. When such grenades are thrown, the weighted ribbon unwinds dynamically and when the unwinding is sufficient arming takes place.
Thus such grenades remain in a safety position at the beginning of their trajectory, which prevents any premature explosion which might result either from combustion of the pyrotechnic delay which is too fast or from voluntary retention for too long of the grenade in the hand after causing firing of the fuse, or from dropping the grenade while throwing, or from the thrower falling because he is wounded by a bullet, or finally from percussion on a close obstacle of the impact fuse.
These weighted ribbons are inexpensive, and their operation is very reliable and very regular, since they do not suffer from the manufacturing defects or poor aging of all the other delay systems (pyrotechnic, clockwork, electronic etc).
2. Description of the Prior Art
However, known weight ribbon systems have drawbacks:
the cap systems, in which the inertia block is free as soon as the cap is removed, have caused undesired unwinding by mistake or through a lack of lighting,
the systems in which the ribbon is attached to a spoon grip cannot be produced economically by mass production because of the complexity of their shapes and their parts (cf. French Pat. No. 1,419,979) or are too fragile and impossible to seal (cf. U.S. Pat. No. 3,112,703),
the systems in which a conventional spoon has been superimposed above the weighted ribbon have proved impracticable (cf. German Pat. No. 1,099,910) because of their shapes, their complexity (numerous springs and inertia blocks) and their lack of sealing, unwinding of the ribbon being hindered in particular by the disturbing and overlong presence of the hook spoon,
finally, the cap system with additional muzzling of the weighted ribbon (cf. French Pat. No. 72.31038 in the name of the applicant) presents no defect in use - it was adopted unreservedly by the French army - but the users finally preferred continuing to have a spoon grenade, so as to facilitate instruction as long as the war stock continues to include old spoon grenades, although the spoon, by itself, offers an illusory and misleading safety, which is a source of countless accidents throughout the world.